Five for Friday - February 27, 2015

What a crazy week!  We've been so busy and my students worked incredibly had this week!  I am so excited to highlight some of our accomplishments and hard work this week on this week's Five for Friday link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

We've been hard at work preparing for our state science test!  We have only 4 teaching days left before our test (WOAH!!) and we've been covering tons of material each day.  The students had a lot of background knowledge about this concept so I used this pictorial input chart to review the "Reason for the Seasons" with them.  They loved doing a pictorial input chart and I'll definitely have to get another one in my planning soon.  This is definitely my favorite GLAD strategy.

Please excuse how messy this chart is but this is the result of quick teaching to maximize review time!

We also had quite a lot of content to cover in math this week, including our mid-unit math test!  We've been learning all about multiplying fractions and we applied the order of operations to fraction equations this week.  I taught my students my favorite method for remembering the order of operations, PEMDAS.  I remember it as "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" but there are many variations of this.  

Again, this is what things look like as I'm quickly teaching them and moving right along.  Not gorgeous but it gets the job done!

We also did our monthly, timed computational fluency assessment.  My students made HUGE gains this month.  February might be short but they've certainly mastered a lot of new content.  They have 10 minutes to answer as many questions as they can on this assessment and they all take their time to work through it slowly while still making it to the end.  I saw them fix up a lot of errors with the placement of their decimal this time around and that made me VERY happy!!

Another huge accomplishment for my class this week was completing their own informational essays!  We've been learning about how inventions are created to meet the needs of society and we spent a few weeks studying the invention of the TV.  They had to take details from a few different sources we'e used in this unit (4) and find relevant evidence to support the author's point.  For this essay, the main idea was that the TV is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and that it has had a tremendous impact on the way we live. We created the introduction together and then they had to go on to prove the points and write a conclusion...and then type it up!  These two were written in just one short hour.  They are great authors!

The whole class, yes---every single student, finished their Cat in the Hat portraits today. We used watercolor, Sharpie and tissue paper!  I love how they turned out and the wall of them together is so beautiful!  I don't ever want to take them down.  Maybe this is because I love watercolor so much!  I also love how the tissue paper bows really made it pop!

Last, but certainly not least, I stocked up on clip art during the TeachersPayTeachers sale!  I am obsessing over Glitter Meets Glue designs right now and bought tons of stuff from her store!  I picked up tons of graphics on science topics and I can't wait to get started with creating some products with these images!  I think these may have been just what I needed to inspire me to publish some new stuff for my store.  I haven't been too creative lately but the ideas are really flowing now!  Hopefully I'll have some new things for you by the next Five for Friday post!